Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

Here’s “Empty Bed Blues” by Bessie Smith:

Bessie Smith — “Empty Bed Blues”

In a music class in junior high–either in sixth or seventh grade, I can’t remember which–our teacher, whose name totally escapes me, unfortunately, but anyway, he was a big, bald man who drove a motorcycle, taught us about the twelve-bar blues form by playing this song. It seemed amazing and funny and strange to us/me at the time.  After listening to it, and after the teacher told us about how the structure works, we then in groups set to the task of writing our own versions of “Empty Bed Blues,” playing the musical accompaniment on autoharps.  It occurs to me these many years later that it must’ve been hilarious watching/listening to these 12 and 13 year old kids playing weird/dumb blues songs based on one of the great blues songs of all time, a song which those kids were pretty much thoroughly incapable of understanding. This same teacher demonstrated to us the concept of “the ostinato, or riff” by playing “In a Gadda Da Vida” by Iron Butterfly–all of it. These are moments that however much I probably did appreciate them at the time, with the benefit of twenty-five years of life and hindsight, I appreciate even more.